Not For Sale

I drove up to the church building on Sunday morning to find a for sale sign on our front lawn. I had a few people in the church ask me about it. Don't worry . . . our church building is not for sale. (The sign has an arrow on it pointing down the road across from our building.) But I admittedly did have a moment of thinking about the possibility of selling our building if we got an offer we couldn't refuse. It is easy to imagine, for the right amount of money, how we could build different space that meets our present needs better and how things could be different if we sold. The lure of something bigger and better and fancier and new is appealing.

But, as a church and as followers of Jesus, we need to be careful of that appeal. It can very easily lead us to sell more than a building. In our world we are constantly bombarded by media that tells us that if we will just buy what they are selling (a car, shoes, new technology, a vacation, a gym membership) that we will get so much more. We'll get the person we want, the power we want, the popularity we want, the peace we want. But will we really? What might we need to sell in order to get our "wants"?

I watched a short video recently about a family that had started out in a small house, but moved to a three-bedroom place when they had two kids and then into a five-bedroom place when they had three kids. They were living the dream they were told they supposed to attain. But then they looked around and realized that in order to pay for and maintain all they had gained they were slowly losing their family, each other, and themselves. They sold it all and downsized so that they could enjoy living again.

Jesus asked the question, "Why would people gain the whole world but lose their lives? What will people give in exchange for their lives?" That word, "lives" is often translated "souls." It basically means "life force" or "true self."

I would love to say that we wouldn't sell our God-given true selves for anything, but too often and too easily we do. It often happens little bits at a time. We sell a little bit of ourselves to get that person to like us. We sell a little bit more in efforts to get that thing that will make life a little bit easier. We sell a little bit more of ourselves for the promotion. We sell a little bit more of ourselves to keep our family happy. Little by little, almost imperceptibly, we can sell our true selves to such an extent that we wake up one day to find we've lost our God-given self . . . our soul.

The same thing can happen as a church. We sell a little bit of ourselves to get more people. We sell a little bit more to try to be "relevant" or "cool." We sell a little bit more of ourselves to get a bigger building. We sell a little bit more of ourselves to avoid conflict. Little by little, almost imperceptibly, we can sell ourselves to such an extent that we wake up and find we've lost our God-given self . . . our collective soul.

So let us dream about what God will do among us and through us in the future. Let's be courageous in imagining and talking and exploring where we may go, led by God's Spirit. But let us be cautious - individually and as a family - not to sell ourselves and lose out on being all that God has created us and longs for us to be.